Evidence and a Sense of Perspective, Please

On the only occasion in my life that I bought a new car, there were a number of criteria that determined my choice; in addition to my wife and youngest daughter’s wishes, that is. These were price, type of car, mileage and upkeep, specification, reliability and make. The colour of the car, its external skin, if you like, didn’t really figure too much, apart from the fact that I didn’t want a white one (shows the dirt too much).

So, when I hear of people judging others, largely, on the basis of the colour of that external “paint job”, I don’t get it. After all, unlike cars, human beings have no choice about the colour they were created with. At which point, I’d like to relate an incident from my own life. It concerns one of my children who came home from school one day upset because of the racist comments another pupil had made. “How do I answer that?” was, I think, the question. My suggestion was to counter by asking, “When we last came out of Africa some 70,000 years ago, did only the white ones leave?” It seems, in fact, that a white pigment is the initial mutation to accommodate the lack of sunlight in the northern hemisphere. That’s not to say that only white people are capable of racism just that I react from that perspective.

Lastly, recent research seems to show that, at one time, those that set out on that journey, may have been down to between a couple of hundred and a couple of thousand individuals. That is, they (we) nearly didn’t make it! Moreover, they didn’t set out to populate the world but just to get to somewhere with a plentiful supply of food and water or to the next source of those once they’d outgrown what was available.

So, in these trying times with, what appears to be, a rising level of concern about immigrants, consider, please, a number of things; namely, where we all, originally, came from, how few of us there may have been and just how thin is that layer of pigmentation that gives us our skin colour. Also that there isn’t another home that we know of anywhere in the vast and inhospitable reach of the interplanetary space, and beyond, that surrounds us.